Crowds and Party

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, crowds have disrupted the settings given by capital and the state. Breaking with the suffocating reflexivity of contribution and critique in the mediated networks of communicative capitalism, insistent crowds impress themselves where they don’t belong. Their very presence challenges the privatization of ostensibly public places from São Paulo, to Istanbul, to New York. Intense and temporary aggregations in multiple locations now appear as one struggle. We see Montreal connected to Athens connected to Tahrir Square connected to Madrid connected to Oakland. Instead of the incommunicable strikes of a multitude of singularities, crowds and riots in place after place communicate the collective movement of the people, pushing questions of similarity, meaning, and alliance: of what politics will the crowd have been the subject?

Some contemporary crowd observers claim the crowd for democracy. They see in the amassing of thousands a democratic insistence, a demand to be heard and included. In the context of communicative capitalism, however, the crowd exceeds democracy. Communicative capitalism reconfigures the relation between crowds, democracy, capitalism, and class. On the one hand, the democratic reading of the crowd blocks these changes from view. It harnesses the crowd into the service of the very setting that the crowd disrupts. On the other hand, the democratic reading opens up a struggle over the subject of politics: the determination whether a crowd is the people or the mob.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the crowd posed questions of power and order. “The crowd—” Walter Benjamin writes, “no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth century writers.”⁷ At the time, the crowd appears as a quintessential political expression of the people.⁸ Inseparable from the rise of mass democracy, the crowd looms with the threat of the collective power of the masses, the force of the many against those who would exploit, control, and disperse them. Whether feared or embraced, the flood, intrusion, or crush of crowds thrusts the collective many into history.

Commentators wanting to keep the people in their place warn against “the extraordinary rebellion of the masses.”⁹ They depict crowds as brutal, primitive, even criminal, mobs. In contrast, commentators seeking the overthrow of the elites champion the crowd’s political vitality. Workers, peasants, and commoners of every sort are recognizing and asserting themselves as sovereign. Marx famously describes the crowds of the Paris Commune as the people “storming heaven.” For nineteenth- and twentiethcentury observers, then, crowds and popular democracy are intertwined. At issue is whether the sovereignty of the people can be anything other than mob rule.

A benefit of the democratic reading of the crowd is its revelation of a split: the mob or the people. The crowd forces the possibility of the intrusion of the people into politics. Whether the people is the subject of a crowd event is up for grabs. The crowd opens up a site of struggle over its subject. A crowd might have been a mob, not an event at all. It might have been a predictable, legitimate gathering, again, not an event but an affirmation of its setting. And it might have the people rising up in pursuit of justice.¹⁰ Which a crowd event is, or, better, which it will have been, is an effect of the political process the crowd event activates. The crowd does not have a politics. It is the opportunity for politics. The determination whether a crowd was a mob or the people results from political struggle.

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Resisting for a while the urge to classify crowds in terms of a pre-given political content enables us to consider crowds in terms of their dynamics. Crowds are more than large numbers of people concentrated in a location. They are effects of collectivity, the influence—whether conscious, affective, or unconscious—of others.¹¹ Contemporary social science analyzes these effects with terms like “band-wagoning,” “bubbles,” and “information cascades.” Mainstream commentary continues to use terms from earlier crowd theory: “imitation,” “suggestion,” and “contagion.”

The most influential early crowd theorist is Gustave Le Bon. His widely reprinted and translated book, The Crowd: A Study ofthe Popular Mind, laid the groundwork for twentieth-century theorization of crowds. I engage Sigmund Freud’s take up of Le Bon as Freud formulates a psychoanalytic theory of group psychology. Benito Mussolini also found Le Bon inspiring, particularly Le Bon’s discussion of the leader.¹² But we need not follow Mussolini into such a narrow focus. The emphasis on the leader displaces our attention from what is ingenious in Le Bon’s notion of the crowd, namely, his rendering of the crowd as a “provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements.”

Le Bon presents the crowd as a distinct form of collectivity. The crowd is not a community. It doesn’t rely on traditions. It doesn’t have a history. The crowd is not held together by unstated norms or an obscene supplement that extends beyond its own immediacy (although crowd images and symbols clearly shape the reception and circulation of crowd events).¹³ Rather, the crowd is a temporary collective being. It holds itself together affectively via imitation, contagion, suggestion, and a sense of its own invincibility. Because the crowd is a collective being, it cannot be reduced to singularities. On the contrary, the primary characteristic of a crowd is its operation as a force of its own, like an organism. The crowd is more than an aggregate of individuals. It is individuals changed through the torsion of their aggregation, the force aggregation exerts back on them to do together what is impossible alone.

The democratic claim for the crowd was powerful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Democracy could name an opposition. Even as communists registered the limits of bourgeois democracy in its use as an instrument of capitalist class rule, democracy could still register a challenge to existing structures of power. In the twentyfirst century, however, dominant nation-states exercise power as democracies. They bomb and invade as democracies for democracy’s sake. International political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic, as do the contradictory entangled media practices of communicative capitalism.¹⁴ When crowds amass in opposition, they poise themselves against democratic practices, systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political setting of the crowd.

Democratic governments justify themselves as rule by the people. When crowds gather in opposition, they expose the limits of this justification. The will of the majority expressed in elections stops appearing as the will of the people. That not-all of the people support this government or those decisions becomes openly, physically, intensely manifest.¹⁵ Disagreement and opposition start to do more than circulate as particular contributions to the production of nuggets of shareable outrage in the never-ending flow of clickbait in which we drown one another. They index collective power, the affective generativity that exceeds individual opinions. Many press back, using the strength of embodied number to install a gap in the dominant order. They make apparent its biases, compromises, and underlying investments in protecting the processes through which the capitalist class accumulates wealth. They expose the fragility of the separations and boxes upholding electoral politics. The crowd reclaims for the people the political field democracy would try to fragment and manage.

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Under communicative capitalism, the democratic claim for the crowd reinforces and is reinforced by the hegemony of ideals of decentralization and self-organization. Early crowd theorists describe the crowd as primitive, violent, and suggestible. In our present context, these descriptions are often inverted as “smart mobs” and the “wisdom of crowds.”¹⁶ Such inversions appropriate the crowd, enlisting it in support of capitalism as they strip away its radical political potential.

Business writers like James Surowiecki, for example, talk about the crowd in terms of collective intelligence.¹⁷ Surowiecki’s primary interest is in how to harness this intelligence, which he treats as information compiled from diverse and independent sources. His claim is that a crowd of self-interested people working on the same problem separately in a decentralized way will come up with the best solution. Cognitive diversity is key, necessary for avoiding imitation and groupthink (necessary, in other words, for blocking the affective binding-together of a provisional collective being). Surowiecki’s exemplary crowds are corporations, markets, and intelligence agencies. Their wisdom depends on mechanisms like prices and systems that are able “to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off.”¹⁸ In actuality, Surowiecki’s crowds are not so much crowds as they are data pools. He can treat the crowd as wise because he has condensed it into information, dispersed it into individual heads, and re-aggregated it under conditions that use the many to benefit the few. Aggregation, Surowiecki admits, is decentralization’s paradoxical partner.

Eugene W. Holland commandeers Surowiecki’s claims for the wisdom of crowds in his attempt to envision a free-market communism.¹⁹ Holland wants to show the plausibility of horizontal, bottom-up, decentralized, and self-organized social organization. Jazz, soccer, the internet, and markets all demonstrate, Holland argues, how group members adapt themselves to one another in the absence of top-down coordination. There are limits to these examples as social models. When playing, musicians and soccer players know and accept that they are involved in a common endeavor.²⁰ A performance and a game necessarily restrict who and how many people can play. Jazz and soccer don’t scale. Further, and more fundamentally, Holland ignores the unavoidable production of inequality on the internet and in markets. Concerned with avoiding anything that smacks of state power, he neglects the extreme division between the one and the many that arises immanently. Self-organization in complex networks doesn’t guarantee horizontality. In fact, it produces hierarchy.

The clearest exposition of the constituent role of inequality in complex networks comes from Albert-László Barabási.²¹ Complex networks are networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. Free markets and the internet are prime examples. Complex networks have a specific structure, a “power-law distribution” of the items in the network. The most popular node or item in the network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular, and so on, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This is the structure that produces blockbuster movies, best-selling novels, and giant internet hubs. The idea appears in popular media as the “80/20 rule,” the winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy and the “long tail.”²²

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In these examples, the “one” in first place emerges through the generation of a common field. These commons can be generated in a variety of ways: in comments on a post (think of Reddit and the ways that readers vote posts up and down; Holland’s examples are Slashdot and Kuro5hin), in web articles (think Huf ington Post blogs or other sites offering lots of clickbait), on Twitter (via hashtags), and through competitions (think of contests for the best city tourism app), to use but a few examples. The contest generates a common field that will produce a winner. The more participation there is— the larger the field—the greater becomes the inequality, that is to say, the greater is the difference between the one and the many. Expanding the field produces the one.

Holland, like so many advocates of self-organization, ignores the structure that free choice, growth, and preferential attachment produce. Using Wikipedia to illustrate his point, Holland emphasizes the equality of Wikipedians.²³ Clay Shirky, however, notes that “the spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it.”²⁴ The so-called wisdom of crowds doesn’t spontaneously generate a free and equitable order. And contra Holland, networked experiments in decentralized self-organization don’t lead in the direction of de-hierarchicized social change but rather toward ever more extreme differentiation between the few and many. Networked communication doesn’t eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us.

Although it may seem far removed from the brutal mob of the nineteenth century, the twenty-first century’s wise crowd is similar in one crucial respect: both attempt to prevent the crowd from introducing a gap through which the people can appear. Depictions of primitive and atavistic crowds in the nineteenth century naturalize their disparagement and repression. Social order and mob rule are antithetical. These people don’t belong in politics. They are not the people with a divisive claim to justice. Twenty-first century evocations of the wisdom of crowds like Surowiecki’s and Holland’s likewise efface the crowd gap, this time absorbing it into idealized market and networked processes. Militant, disruptive, political crowds become so many selforganizing units, the self-interests of which naturally converge. Nineteenth-century treatments of the crowd as a mob acknowledge antagonism, but try to prevent it from being linked to the people. Twenty-first century versions of smart mobs deny antagonism altogether, substituting the interactions of individuals and small groups for organized political struggle. Surowiecki and Holland try to ensure that these interactions don’t coalesce into provisional heterogeneous beings but remain differentiated singularities.

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Each rejects imitation, a basic crowd dynamic, Surowiecki to avoid bubbles and riots, Holland to guarantee difference. They may use the term “crowds,” but their crowds neither become collective beings nor force a gap. In the complex networks of communicative capitalism, the so-called “wisdom of crowds” isn’t a matter of the intrusion of the many into politics. It’s the generation and circulation of the many in order to produce the one.

Crowd Struggle Is Class Struggle

Not all crowds install a gap. The networks of communicative capitalism generate and rely on crowds, that is, massive pools of many. State and capital try to keep them in check, to absorb them back into the state of things, into the incessant circulation of spectacles we collectively produce for the private accumulation of the few. For example, when the 2009 protests following Iran’s presidential election were described as the “Twitter Revolution” and the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was called the “Facebook Revolution,” the disruptive acts of a revolutionary people were inscribed into a US-centric technophilic imaginary. The crowd opening was subsumed into communicative capitalism, proffered as more evidence of the liberatory character of the networked media practices that support and extend economic inequality. The question of the crowd’s politics, what it was for or against, what in fact was going on, was subsumed under the story of masses using media. The story confirmed to those with smart-phones and laptops that nothing different was happening here. It’s all the same activity, just in a different place.

At the same time, the terms “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” mark these social media platforms as crowd fora. Twitter and Facebook are not just tools. They are manifestations of the affective intensities associated with crowds—cascade effects, enthusiasm, band-wagoning, contagion, and imitation. To describe revolutions in terms of their platforms is to imply that the networked crowd may incite an anticapitalist, even communist, collective political subject, the revolt of the many against the few. Put in the vocabulary of dialectics, crowds can become “in and for themselves.” Capitalists know this—and fear it. Consider the warning from a business writer advising companies how they can leverage the creative power of the crowd to cut costs. He admits that even though people will work for free, they “will want a sense of ownership over their contributions” and may “develop proprietary feelings over the company itself.”²⁵ This business writer is expressing in capitalist terms the Marxist insight that people will start to become conscious of the disconnect between their work and someone else’s ownership of their work. At a moment when twenty-first-century capitalists are lauding the wisdom of crowds and celebrating crowd-sourcing as the future of business, to say “Twitter Revolution” and “Facebook Revolution” is to broach the possibility that the posting and sharing many could seize the means of communications.

Mainstream commentators on the last decade of protests have thus been right to link them to ubiquitous communication networks. But they are wrong when they imply that protests are occurring because people can easily coordinate with social media, that they are primarily struggles for democracy, or that they are indications of a push for freedom on the part of networked individuals.²⁶ The crowds and riots of the last decade— particularly those associated with the Occupy movement, Chilean student protests, Montreal debt protests, Brazilian transportation and FIFA protests, European antiausterity protests, as well as the multiple ongoing and intermittent strikes of teachers, civil servants, and medical workers all over the world—are protests of the class of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. These are not struggles of the multitude, struggles for democracy, or struggles specific to local contexts. Nor are they merely the defensive struggles of a middle class facing cuts to social services, wage stagnation, unemployment, foreclosure, and indebtedness. They are fronts in global communicative capitalism’s class war, revolts of those whose communicative activities generate value that is expropriated from them.²⁷

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As Jaron Lanier notes, “We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing the new roles that are valuable in relation to the latest technologies. Ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes.”²⁸ This is the real face of the knowledge class, that is to say, the proletarianized people producing the information, services, relations, and networks at the core of communicative capitalism (what others sometimes refer to as the “knowledge economy” or “information society”). They make more and get less, intensifying inequality with every communicative contribution and its trace. A 2014 World Economic Forum report puts it bluntly: “the greater the role that data play in the global economy, the less the majority of individuals will be worth.”²⁹

Enda Brophy and Greig de Peuter demonstrate why, under communicative capitalism, paid, precarious, and unpaid labor should not be treated separately: these forms of labor constitute a “circuit of exploitation.”³⁰ Brophy and de Peuter use the smart-phone to draw out this labor circuit, making it legible in terms of work common to a “cybertariat.” The “circuit of exploitation” around the smartphone links extraction, assembly, and design to mobile work, support work, and e-waste. We can fill out ideas of mobile and support work by adding in content provision and use, the data and metadata contributed to communication streams and then stored, mined, auctioned, and sold. The concept of “circuits of exploitation” lets us recognize communication networks as networks of exploitation linking communicative labor across the social field. Under communicative capitalism most of us can’t avoid producing for capitalism. Our basic communicative activities are enclosed in circuits as raw materials for capital accumulation.

Demographic data supports my claim that the last decade of revolts are the class struggle of those proletarianized under communicative capitalism. In an analysis of Occupy Wall Street, Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis find that highly educated young people were overrepresented among OWS activists and supporters and that many were underemployed, indebted, or had recently lost their jobs.³¹ A report based on data collected by Turkish security forces shows that over half the Gezi park protesters were in university or university graduates even as their incomes were in the bottom economic half.³² Andre Singer, looking at the massive Brazilian protests of June 2013, likewise emphasizes the predominance of young, highly educated, and un- or underemployed adults.³³ More specifically, Singer notes that in protests in the eight state capitals, 43 percent of protesters had college degrees. In protests in São Paulo, nearly 80 percent had college degrees. These educational levels would suggest a middle-class revolt. But data on income and occupation point in the direction of the lower and lowermiddle class, the bottom half of society where people are more likely to work as shop assistants, drivers, waiters, receptionists, and primary school teachers than as technicians or administrators. To make sense of the disparity between high education and low incomes, Singer posits a new proletariat or precariat taking to the streets, the exploited service and knowledge workers of communicative capitalism.

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Looked at most broadly, the demographics of recent protests point to heavy involvement by those who are young, well educated, and un- or underemployed. Because of communicative capitalism’s tight labor market, they encounter a decreasing return on their investment in education. In 2014, more than 80 percent of low-wage workers in the US had at least a high school degree; nearly 11 percent had bachelor’s degrees.³⁴ As more people wind up in jobs for which they are overqualified, they end up pushing those without a college education out of the labor market entirely, thereby contributing indirectly to long-term unemployment.³⁵ In this regard, it should be noted that in 2013 the occupations employing the largest numbers of people in the US were all in the service sector: retail sales, cashiers, food service, office workers, nursing, and customer service.³⁶ The annual income of three of the top four occupations in the US (determined by percentage of the workforce)—retail, cashiers, and food service—is below the poverty line.³⁷

Alongside the large-scale movements like 2011’s Occupy, the movement of the squares in Spain and Greece, and the Arab spring, as well as 2013’s protests in Turkey and Brazil, there has been a wide array of strikes and actions by others we might think of as proletarianized communicative laborers. In the US, the protests of civil service workers in Wisconsin in 2011 and the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012 stand out. Globally, the strikes are virtually innumerable. Consider just one month, March 2014.³⁸ That month there were strikes of public sector and airport workers in Germany, cleaners at the University of London, civil servants, teachers, doctors, and pharmacists in Greece, teachers and education support workers in Western Australia, and non-teaching staff and postal workers in India; there was a telecom strike in Ghana and a sit-in at an airport in Sudan in protest over the contracting-out of security jobs; seven thousand doctors in South Korea went on strike in opposition to plans to introduce telemedicine and for-profit hospital subsidiaries. And this is just a partial list for March. Nonetheless, it points to the active, ongoing, but still disconnected struggles in the workplaces of communicative laborers.

Given changes in the workplace associated with increased use of technology, flexibilization, and precaritization, and linked to the decline of unions, we should not expect class struggle in communicative capitalism to manifest primarily as workplace struggles. Communicative production takes place throughout the social field. That a struggle doesn’t take the form of a classic workplace struggle, then, doesn’t mean that it’s not class struggle. Student, debt, housing, and education protests need to be understood in terms of the class politics of those encountering proletarianization, not as separate and specific issue-based politics. On the flipside, that a primary organizational feature of the recent protests has been the general or mass assembly, often in parks or public squares, should also not misdirect us away from class struggle. Incidentally, this is one of the interesting features of the mainstream emphasis on the fact that Occupiers were always on their phones uploading video and tweeting and all the rest: for some contingent and mobile workers, the park is a workplace. Phones are means of production. When they occupy, communicating activists put these means of production to a use of their own choosing, not capital’s (although capital can still expropriate their content and metadata).

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So what should we expect? Changes in communication and subjectivity under communicative capitalism, not to mention thirty years of resurgent capitalist class power, point to the real challenges for political organizing.³⁹ As I explore more fully in chapter one, intense attachments to unique individuality as people try to construct “personal brands” that can help them “stand out in a crowd” hinder solidarity. We should expect suspicion of those deemed threatening to that uniqueness. Likewise, because of the instability of meaning in communicative capitalism—what Slavoj Žižek terms the “decline of symbolic efficiency”—contemporary movements are less likely to rely on empty signifiers like “freedom” and “justice.” We should thus expect greater reliance on common images, tactics, and names—the more generic, the greater the reach: umbrella, tent, mask, Occupy, hashtag.⁴⁰ Micro-politics, identity politics, anarchism, one-off demos, clicktivism, and ironic events seem more compelling (they would definitely be easier) than the sustained work of party building because they affirm the dominant ideology of singularity, newness, and now. At the same time, we should expect increasing emphasis on inequality as people cry out and push back against widespread debt, insecurity, and dispossession. And we should expect new, extended modes of coming together as the formerly fragmented experience first-hand the sense of invincibility accompanying collective power.

Reading the protests and revolts of the last decade as the class struggle of the people proletarianized under communicative capitalism, we can account for the ubiquity of personalized media, the demographics of the people protesting, the economic position of the protesters, and the political ambiguity of the protests. New proles often have a strong libertarian bent. They may present themselves as post-political, even antipolitical (as in, for example, the Spanish movement of the squares). Their identities are so fluid that they can be channeled in different directions that they simultaneously always exceed. They have a hard time uniting as a class even as their actions are the expressions of a class.

A key characteristic of recent protests has been that they are out of doors. Unlike nineteenth- and early twentieth-century riots that could happen because people already interacted with one another in concentrated urban spaces, more recent ones require an extra effort of overcoming isolation, leaving home or work, remaining outside, and merging with crowds of strangers. People must self-consciously assemble themselves in settings not determined by capital and the state. It doesn’t just happen. The surprise of their collectivity pushes against the expectations of disconnected consumption and screen-gazing that are so much a part of early twenty-first century sociality. The flash mob has been one of the forms experimenting with and drawing out this surprise-effect (although it has quickly been put to use in guerrilla marketing campaigns). Occupation has been even more effective, particularly as it has moved from inside to outside, enabling the occupying crowd to amplify its effect via visibility, noise, growth, and interaction with its setting. As isolated tactics, however, these forms have reached their limit. The challenge consists in changing political actions into political power.

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We the Party

At the end of the nineteenth and for most of the twentieth century, parties organizing the working class held out the promise of consolidating mass power, whether into forms for its radical self-assertion or for its subordination and control. By the 1970s and ’80s, however, wide swathes of the Left had become convinced that the party form was no longer adequate to left aspirations. This conviction had multiple sources: the stagnation and authoritarianism of the party-states of the former East; the complicity and betrayals of communist and socialist parties in the former West; the failure of class analysis to address and include the politics of identity, particularly with respect to sex and race, to mention but a few. The loss of confidence in the party as a form for left politics accompanied organized capital’s attacks on unions, waged violently and directly through state power and policy as well as through corporate off-shoring of factories and changes in the technical composition of labor. The political incapacity of socialist and communist parties in the face of this onslaught—an incapacity that manifested itself in Anglo-European contexts as adaptation to the individualist, consumerist, and market suppositions of the resurgent capitalist class and failure to defend working-class political achievements—seemed a final nail in the coffin of the politics of class and party that had defined the century. In the terms that came to define the theoretical debates of the time, there was nothing “essential” about class, class identity, class politics, or class struggle.⁴¹ And, with no class politics, there was no need for a class party, that is, a party that takes as its goal the abolition of the conditions of capitalist exploitation that create classes. Instead, left politics would involve an ever-expanding array of issues and identities, the problematizing and pluralizing of sedimented practices and ideas throughout the terrain of the social, cultural, and increasingly, the personal.

All this would unfold against the background of a capitalism to which there was no alternative. Better put, any alternative (for those still interested in putting an end to capitalist exploitation—many radical democrats proceeded as if their goal were simply capitalism with a human face) would emerge not as a result of organized struggle or left strategy but immanently, organically, as a direct effect of capitalism’s own development, spontaneism now refigured as autonomy.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire captured the political atmosphere on the dispersing Left at century’s end. Hardt and Negri offered a vision of innumerable local struggles across the globe, each striking at the heart of Empire.⁴² These struggles may well be incommunicable, their cries and anger, goals and demands confined to their settings, but this incommunicability, Empire told us, is an advantage. Struggles are free to unfold on their own, unhindered by the discipline and constraint of larger organizations. Autonomous struggles don’t reinforce state structures. They enhance the generative creativity of multiple modes of becoming, releasing the constituent power of the multitude from Empire’s parasitic hold. Key to the appeal of the multitude concept, then, was its expression of weakness as strength. The absence of a common language— not to mention a program—didn’t appear as an indication of the actual incapacity of the Left to cohere into a discernible politics and present a viable opposition to capitalist and right-wing forces. Instead it marked a liberation from the constraints of Marxist dogma, an opening for politicizations hroughout the social field.

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Hardt and Negri turned left defeat into an opportunity to reimagine communist politics. This reimagining needs to go further. It can go further by highlighting division, antagonism, and political organization. Nearly forty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side. It’s imperative that multiplicity not replace class but be understood as a class characteristic. Let me explain.

The vision of a multitude of incommunicable struggles theorized by Hardt and Negri and held up in appeals to democracy replaces the antagonism of class struggle with pluralization, creativity, and becoming, thereby flattening out and immediatizing the terrain of struggle. Such a rendering of each strike as equivalent obliterates differences in resources, histories, and opportunities, effacing the uneven development of capitalism. It obscures the dimension of time, as if struggles occurred in discreet bursts rather than building, unfolding, advancing, and retreating. And it disavows the tensions within struggles, as if histories of oppression left no trace on those who organize to dismantle the arrangements of power that continue them. In effect, the goal becomes, as in communicative capitalism itself, the production of the many, the multitude of singularities. The political effect is a failure to build a concentrated political force with the sustained capacity to confront and replace the capitalist mode of production. Instead, there are small battles, policy options, and cultural interventions, victories that can be absorbed and defeats that can be forgotten (when they aren’t fetishized as yet another instance of inevitable left failure). To the extent that pluralization—and the moves to fragment and individuate that accompany it—is a left political priority, politics becomes passionately attached to the small and weak. This gives us the shape of the Left we have in the long tail of micro-initiatives.

The new cycle of struggles has demonstrated the political strength that comes from collectivity. Common names, tactics, and images are bringing the fragments together, making them legible as many fronts of one struggle against capitalism. Where the proliferation of issues and identities disperses and weakens us—inciting the snark that glorifies itself as critique even as it undermines solidarity—the crowd events of the last decade are forcing a new sense of collective power. They have pushed expectations of multiplicity into experiences of collectivity. The question that emerges from these experiences is how they might endure and extend, how the momentary discharge of equality that crowds unleash might become the basis for a new process of political composition.

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